INTRODUCTION Greg Dawes defends a modified version of Ockham’s Razor which he calls ontological economy.He says,“…my revised version of Ockham’s razor suggests that we should not posit new kinds of entities without sufficient reason. It follows that if there is sufficient reason to do so, positing new kinds of entities is acceptable.”[1]

ASSESSMENTDawes admits that the virtue of ontological economy is virtually indistinguishable from fit with background knowledge.Because of this, he says that an explanation will partially possess ontological economy even if it posits a new kind of entity so long as we can point to causes of the same type.[1]I believe I have shown this in my ‘Fit With Background Knowledge’ post in this blog series.However, this doesn’t fully demonstrate that theistic explanations possess more ontological economy than naturalistic explanations.Indeed, it seems that naturalistic explanations will always possess more ontological economy than theistic explanations because we know for certain that physical entities exist.While this is prima facie evidence to favor naturalistic explanations over theistic ones, there are two further considerations to think that theistic explanations should be preferred nonetheless.First, as Dawes admits, if we could show that the theistic hypothesis possessed other explanatory virtues to a high enough degree, then ontological economy becomes irrelevant.Indeed, “As with any theory, the most important virtue of an ontology is its explanatory power.There is not much point in eliminating a category of things from an ontology, if it does not increase our understanding to do so. The Humean reduction of causes to regularities, for example, made possible an ontology without the category of causal relationships.But it did so at the expense of our understanding of reality.”[2]Not only have I shown that theistic explanations possess all of Dawe’s other explanatory virtues at least as well as naturalistic explanations, but I believe I have shown that theism possesses far greater explanatory power (See my posts under: Scholarly Naturalism/Paul Draper’s Work) than naturalistic explanations and that matters much more than any benefit naturalistic explanations may have over theistic ones with respect to ontological economy.Indeed, what this illustrates is that if ontological economy doesn’t take a back seat to other virtues like explanatory power, then it ceases to be a virtue, and becomes a vice.Second, if we can show that naturalism is necessarily false because a supernatural mind exists with factual necessity, then ontological economy will give us no reason to discount theistic explanations for positing a new kind of entity.For in that case, we wouldn’t just have sufficient reason, we would have the strongest possible reason to posit a new kind of entity. I suppose it should come as no surprise that I think there are good reasons to conclude that naturalism is necessarily false (See my post under: Scholarly naturalism/Paul Draper/Who Bear’s the Burden of Proof). [1] Ibid, 136.[2]Brian Ellis, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, 36.